The estimation of human body shape has a wide variety of applications, from medical to commercial domains. In medicine, for example, it may be possible to visualise future changes to a 3-D body to encourage lifestyle change. In the commercial domain accurate capture of nude body shape would allow virtual fitting; visualisation of the customer in different clothing.
Obtaining a desired shape for a subject such as a human is usually the result of fitting a mesh to data, such as images or 3D scans. Fitting algorithms can often achieve efficiency benefits from a course to fine representation.